Ellen Crosby's Moscow Nights paints a wonderfully atmospheric picture of Moscow before the turn of the twenty-first century. She depicts this scene primarily through the eyes of American journalist Claire Brennan, who reluctantly accepts an assignment to go to Moscow for a short time to substitute for a colleague who is ill. The colleague, Ian Kendall, was Claire's lover and remains a good friend. When she arrives in Moscow, she is met by David Manning, another former colleague whom she regards as arrogant and cold; he immediately begins telling her all the precautions that she must take. Manning also tells Claire that Ian died that morning.

This news exacerbates Claire's confusion and self-doubt about the city and her assignment. We see her initial incredulity, her horror at the way many Russians live, and her gradual assimilation. She learns about the need to bribe many workers, from police to the woman who cleans her hotel room, and about the underground economy that sustains many residents. It would be easy for her to become depressed, but she manages to fight through her problems and take initiative.

Claire learns that fifty thousand dollars is unaccounted for from the agency's safe. Suspicion has of course fallen on Ian, and Claire determines that she must clear his name. As she gets to know some of the American and British citizens who live in the area, she realizes that Ian's death might not have been a natural one, so she is also trying to figure out who would want to kill him. She realizes that Ian was working on some sort of project, which she suspects could have led to his death. At the same time, she hopes to track down a friend of her mother's, whose letters she found in her mother's things.

Claire naturally flounders a bit as she learns her way around and tries to figure out what Ian might have been up to. She must sort out a lot of confused feelings and figure out whom, among many people who all seem to have their own hidden agendas, she can trust. She makes good decisions and bad ones as she gets closer to answers. Crosby does a good job of making Claire bright but still quite fallible because she is trying to draw conclusions from incomplete and confusing information, at the same time that she is trying to sort out aspects of her personal life. This is reflected somewhat in the lyrics of the song of the same title--one of the most popular Russian songs outside the country--in which the singer wonders about his lover's attitude toward him but declares that he will forever remember their nights in Moscow.

My one complaint about the story is a rather extreme coincidence about Claire's family. It was one more thing for her to figure out, and possibly helped her with her overall investigation, but it strained my credulity a bit. On the other hand, it would set up a very interesting sequel. This is a minor matter in the context of a complex story that shows an appealing character dealing with a very unfamiliar place. I like Claire a lot, but the real star of the book might be Moscow itself.

Crosby tells us in an Author's Note that precedes the text that the story is based largely on her journals from the time that she spent living and working in Moscow for ABC News. As she hopes, her writing has matured in the course of writing her Wine Country series and two books about photojournalist Sophie Medina. But her gifts for portraying character and place are already evident in this, her first published novel. ( )